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Sony PCG-U1
hexdcml writes "Just found this whilst browsing, Sony has now brought out the My Little Vaio range, (probably for rich kids..tsk) All I can say is WOW, this thing is tiny.
Makes me wanna ditch my lurvely little iBook and get this!
The site's in japanese, so you'll need to translate (for those how are non-japansese literate) using Babelfish or something." Dynamism.com has specifications in English.
Sony's latest prototype, the PCG-U1, is a wonderful and exotic piece of technology. The "U1" is the smallest and lightest model of the entire "Vaio" series. Indeed, it has long been Sony's conception to shrink a full-featured laptop into an always-carry device; they have succeeded with the Vaio U1. The entire package, including a Crusoe 867 MHz processor, 6.4" (XGA) TFT-LCD, 20gb HDD, 384mb RAM (max), weighs merely 1.8 pounds, and boasts an incredible footprint of only 7.3" x 5.5". The U1 is designed for easy operation even if the user is holding it in a standing posture. Assuming use with both hands holding the chassis, the PC has a "wide-stick" for the thumb of the right hand which functions as a mouse cursor. The left thumb rests on a button that works as the left and right mouse buttons. There is also a built-in zoom function, which works at the touch of a button. A scrolling "Jog Dial" is also mounted above the keyboard, and integrated ports include a PC card slot, firewire, LAN, a headphone/audio output. Additionally, a pair of built-in USB ports and a VGA output allow the machine to double as a desktop unit. The U1 demonstrates why Sony is recognized, even by hardened competitors, as the world's leader in miniaturizing consumer devices. Any individual, company, or organization could find a unique use for the U1. Whether the needs is for an eye-catching model unlike anything that has come before, or a powerful tool for use by a sales force out in the field, the Vaio U1 is an unprecedented and unrivaled powerhouse in an ultra-small package.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
With a base price of $2199....umm...yyeeeaaaahhhh
A 128mb RAM upgrade is.....$399
A toy for the rich kids is right!
tjhe kleybpoard ois a vbit as,mall
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
Yes. You can play Unreal Tournament/Half Life/Quake III/Your Favorite Game Here. Try that on a Palm. And this sure beats the processing power of my TI-89's 10 MHz MC68HC360.
Bad thing is, though, that when someone tries to steal it from you and you hit them with it, it's too light to leave a lasting imprint.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Seriously, I'd have to agree with the submittor here. I am all for giving your kids the best, but kids in the My First X demographic (under 8? at some point primary colors get embarrassing) don't really have a use for a laptop. Even if they did, a retired laptop (even from ebay) would probably a better choice than this product, which just screams "status symbol."
I didn't get a current system until college, always learning on and using yesteryear's tech. It's a good way to go, b/c you don't take the cutting edge hardware for granted. I think it made me more aware of issues like backwards compatability, which is important.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Nice and small... not quite as small as my libretto I don't think but still small enough to make it easy to take around. Plus I've noticed that the small sony keyboard layouts are much roomier than the Libretto layout (especially the one on my 50CT).
Unfortunately Dynamism is charging $2000 to import it. Then again, the Libretto 50CT cost that much when it first got here too.
For those of you who like large notebooks, large screens etc. surprise! this isn't the laptop for you! Unfortunately "Texas size" laptops are more popular here in the US and small laptops like this one and the Libretto series have had to stay in Japan.
... if I mine comes with a cute Japanese girl hiding behind it. ;-)
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
How on Earth do you control the mouse on that thing?
Maybe Sony pays people to read Slashdot and so they can mod down anti-Sony comments. Personally I thought the OP was legit too. Sony==RIAA+MPAA
The guy is typing with his thumbs! And the icons look pinhead-size. This is all very neat how we can shrink things smaller and smaller, but... ergonomics anyone? How about keeping your eyesight past your 20's?
I think the whole PDA/Tablet PC/Subnotebook thing is in general pretty silly. For general use they are horrible. Better to get something like the Hitachi WIA with an input device like the Twiddler and keep your wrists and eyes healthy.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
all the other junk you need to bring along: power supplies, extra battery, mouse, network cord, phone cord, teething ring...
I feel the same way about laptops in general - there are some out there that solve almost all of this, however. Personally I carry the following:
- white ibook
- thin little ethernet cable
- power brick (into which apple conveniently put cable management)
And that's it. Nothing else. Occasionally I bring a mouse, but not often.I suppose that leads me to a point about this Sony laptop we're supposed to be discussing: no builtin ethernet, no builtin wavelan, no builtin modem. Hmm. That would drive me insane, as I would end up carrying two or three pcmcia cards and their dongles around with me, and that's when things get broken in my backpack. I'd forgive it if it had builtin wavelan. In fact, that would be marvelous. It doesn't, however. And, I might add, I actually had a Sony SR7k (followed by an SR27k) for a year and a half, and I sold it in favor of an iBook for this exact reason. Oh well.
Moral of the story: I'm keeping my iBook. :) You can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
I've had an IBM PC110 since 1994 - similar size machine but 486 era, much smaller disk/memory and only a 486 CPU. Its still vastly more useful in many ways than palmtoilets and the various other PDA devices that people use. The PDA's are slowly getting there but the PC110 has a real keyboard, runs X11, runs x86 binaries, supports every PCMCIA driver the x86 platform in general does and so forth.
Its close to pervasive computing - it lacks vga out to images projected onto mirror shades, it lacks a cable link down the sleeve to a chord keypad/mouse and it needs a nice microphone/earphone for voice/audio/encrpyted phonecalls via a GSM modem and 802.11 card
Even a kid's hand look too big on the keyboard. There's small and there's usable after fifteen generation of some, uh, serious genetic engineering.
Man, you're supposed to use a mouse to move the cursor, not to help you type by running over the keys.
Can you say "Tinkerbelle's PC?"
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I'm somewhat biased sure, but I can assure you all that I was not trolling (trolling for what?!)
Supporting these corporations is simply the Wrong Thing To Do, which needs to be pointed out, repeatedly, for the "DMCA baaad. Ohh.. shiny things"-crowd.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I might even consider replacing my Newton if it weren't for the price
...if it had a built-in microphone
...and if it had decent battery life
...and if it had handwriting recognition
...and it didn't come with a bloated desktop OS
...and did I mention the price?
- The market there is (proportionally) more interested in miniaturization for its own sake.
- The initial prices for high-end consumer electronics are higher than in the U.S., so they can afford more of a risk.
- The market is smaller than in the U.S., so it costs less to launch something new.
The latter two are important because the smaller devices generally involve more custom engineering, and thus have a higher initial cost and greater risk to the company.uhm check again.. there is built in ethernet, and considering how fast the 802.11x is changing, I would prefer the pcmcia wireless
I don't know what kind of improvements Sony might have made since I bought my Vaio, but I can't imagine they're anywhere near up to speed with Apple yet. I'm comparing a powerbook and a Vaio that were bought around the same time.
These are all the reasons why I don't get excited about the ever smaller/flimsier/less expandable offerings from Sony. If you want the mother of all laptops, get yourself a Mac, and take your pick between Linux (haven't tried the new Mandrake PPc yet - looks sweet) or OSX (I'm a sworn Mac convert now).
While I'm no fan of Sony as a company, one has to admit that they occassionally do something right.
::goes to take a shower::
It might be better if Sony's revenue stream dropped off entirely, but I consider 2nd-best to be a relocation of its revenue stream away from music. Since fewer computers (especially these things) will be sold than CDs and at a narrower profit margin, buying one of these as opposed to the eqivelant price in CDs gives Sony less money.
Ok, so I'm an apologist. I confess, I thought of buying it. EEEEEEEEE. I feel so dirty.
-knots
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
I'm typing this on a Sony SRX77 running Redhat 7.2 right now. IT'S AWESOME! 2.76 pounds, 4 hours of battery life, 1-1.5 inches thick, and fast as hell in linux.
.
The install was kind of a pain, but the end result is a fast, super-portable linux box that makes iBook folks drool. I've run Apache, MySQL, and mod_perl for client demos on this, and it's pretty impressive. .
I honestly wouldn't want a smaller laptop than the SRX77, though.
My 16-month old has already broken a cellphone and 2 DVD-ROM drives. Yeah, you can bet I'll be buying her one of these real soon...
Tiny keyboards only allow one finger at a time typing. You can't get much work done on it
I can touch-type on the Libretto 70 keyboard which has a 14.5mm key pitch. I'd guess I could do it on this 14mm keyboard too. Once on the shuttle bus from an airport to a conference, I was sitting beside someone who thought I'd never be able to type on it. We had a race, which I won (or I'd never be telling this story, obviously).
There was a big advantage in having the computer not take up much space, so my hands weren't as cramped as his. This is also an advantage on planes in economy class.
and it'll cramp your game playing.
The game playing also affects how much work you get done...
The Japanese name for this thing is "Ichiban chiisai Vaio", which translates directly as "number 1 small Vaio". An idiomatic translation would be "The smallest Vaio", although in Japanese as well as English "Number 1" also connotes "best".
There's no suggestion in the Japanese name that it's aimed at kids; rather that it's ultra-portable, something you could put in your purse, fit into your 3-square-meter million-dollar Tokyo apartment, or use on a packed Shinkansen.
The English trademark "my first Vaio" gives a different impression of the device, at least to native English speakers, but native English speakers are not the primary audience for this.
Hypermedia, virtual worlds, human interface, truth, beauty.
It's designed for the "Thumb Generation", the Japanese who have taken to 3G wireless technologies with abandon. Because they use cell phones for messaging, they're developing amazingly adroit thumbing skills. The suggested thumb use for this Vaio is demonstrated here.
i think just about everyone who is literate in another language is "non-japansese literate".
i could be wrong, it's happened before. twice.
The first generation of pen / tablet computers didn't go over so well, because they were too big. I think the wide acceptance of PDAs, combined with the miniaturization demonstrated by the this little VAIO, sets the stage for a second wave of pen computers.
At this size, give me just the screen, or give me two screens that fold up like a book. I could probably write graffiti faster than I could hunt and peck on that keyboard, to say nothing of the mouse.
Before you front on the thing, try it out... I've used several computers, and I'm starting to really fall in love with my iBook (the new, white version with 14" screen). In fact, I'm even using my desktop machine less and less - and that has a 21" monitor.
-- passion
- passion
Would you buy a machine called a "play" station? it sounds like something for little kids!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I think ikekrull was talking about Apple's plans to provide new OSX video acceleration for newer cards. They will *not* be providing drivers for the Rage 128 and older, see the slashdot story of a few days ago. Linux may be fine with the video, and may already have accelerated drivers, but then again Linux is not made by the company that produces the iBook, which happens to be Apple. OSX has never had any acceleration, and even after the X 10.2 comes out, Rage 128 never will (AFAWK).
My friend has a touchstream keyboard which he used full-time for a couple weeks. His emails constantly looked like the parent post. He attributed this to lack of tactile or auditory feedback.
On the other hand, I use a small two-way alphanumeric pager (size comparison, closeup). You end up typing on it preying-mantis like, holding the front with your thumbs nad the back with your pinkies, and typing with your two pointer fingers. Typing is definitely slower, but you don't end up making constant mistakes like with the other keyboards mentioned.
May point is... as far as I know, mini keyboards are the best solution so far, there are worse solutions available.
I'm british, so it's not a big deal.
(ok, not really. But I prefer my asian chicks nice and americanized anyway)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I could touch type on a ti-92, so I'm sure I could handle this thing.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
When I the ethenet card for my laptop, the drivers came on a floppy disk. Sure I could get drivers off the 'net, but not without the eth card.
A friend of mine happened to have a Sony digital camera that let you mount it as a drive on a PC. We copied the stuff over to the cam, and then used the stick to install drivers. Pretty convoluted but it worked...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I once opened up the front pannel to see if I could fix a power problem (I couldn't charge it back up after I sent it electricity with the wrong polarity in a botched attempt to use a car adaptor... I couldn't fix the problem)
Anyway, the layout was pretty straight forwared on the sr33k I have. One little wire for the touchpad, and the RAM and hard drive were right there for you to remove/replace.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
He's not talking about people using Linux... (besides, if you're going to run linux why would you get an iBook? 500mhz g3? Um, yeh...)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I still have my PC110, and it still works well. I don't carry it around much anymore, but it still blows people away when I do. (All the moreso when I tell them that it's an 8-year-old computer).
Right now I'm working on turning mine into a sort of desk clock/weather station/wireless AP, since it doesn't really have the oomph to do much else anymore (esp. w/ only 8 megs of RAM), and my P-series Lifebook is at least an order of magnitude more powerful and only twice the size.
Anyhow, thanks, Alan, for putting/keeping the PC110 touchpad driver in the kernel! I still crack a smile every time I do 'make menuconfig' and see that option, even when I'm not on the wee beastie.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
What the hell does this mean?
Babelfish is col and all, but I can't wait until AI's are advanced enough to translate thigns properly.
"Me and my girl named bimbo . . . limbo . . . spam" - Captain Beefheart.
... that dynamism.com stole images from Sony's web site and proceeded to watermark them with their own logo.
The Japanese use Chinese characters though... and all the Chinese keyboards I've seen have Chinese characters on them. See this one as an example...
The keyboard has hiragana on it, which is the Japanese syllabic writing system for native works. Shift (I think) outputs the equivilant katakana, which is the syllabic writing system for borrowed (foreign) words. An input system on the computer automatically replaces the kana with the kanji for words that can be written in kanji as you go.
:)
There are actually dozens of systems for inputting Chinese and Japanese in computers. That is the most common for Japanese today to my knowledge. In China the most common is to have a keyboard with special characters that represent the sounds in Chinese using a system called BoPoMoFo. Unlike the Japanese Kana, the BoPoMoFo characters are never used when writing; only for typing.There actually are Chinese keyboards with large arrays of Hanji (same as Kanji, but how the Chinese say it). Watch the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies to see Bond be intimidated by one
If anyone cares to know more I'd recomend this book published by Oreilly.
Oh, and PinYin is the romanization system for Chinese endorsed by the government of the PRC. The BoPoMoFo keyboard symbols represent PinYin sounds.
The Japanese use Chinese characters
The Japanese use Japanese characters (kanji) that resemble Chinese characters. They usually input them by spelling them out (using hiragana - the equivalent to an alphabet) and having the computer guess at the meaning, then correct that meaning. It usually works out alright.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I think the local target audience is Tokyo commuters who will use it while standing on a crowded train.
Believe me, doing that, you get good at typing with your thumbs - touch typing isn't really an option unless you manage to get a seat - in which case you are more likely to try and catch a bit of sleep.
The small footprint will also appeal to people who have no extra desk space but want to peek at their personal mail at work or carry their MP3s with them.
Things get crowded here - more than you'd imagine if you've never commuted to and worked in a Japanese office, so I guess that's why it's been introduced here and not in the US...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
I'm sure someone else will mention this before my reply gets submitted, but to clear this one up:
:) Certainly easier than for English in the average case.
:P But that's a different story.
Japan uses three ideographic alphabets, hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are small sets, and non-ambiguous. On a japanese keyboard you use a shift key to choose which you're typing in, then input them phonetically.
Kanji is the set of imported chinese characters. Japan uses a small subset of traditional chinese characters called the "Joyou" character set. (My spelling could be awful on that) It's got around 1900 characters that are in common use, and an additional few hundred characters used just for names. (It's changed quite a bit in the past few decades since I last studied Japanese formally, so take those numbers with a grain of salt.)
The kanji _are_ ambiguous, that is, the same pronounciation can have multiple character representation. But with so many possible pronounciations and so few characters (relatively) it doesn't take long to tab through your options when you input one. Generally the way to input kanji is to type in the pronounciation, then the word processor guesses the one you want, then if neccesary you tab through the rest of the options to find the other one. It sounds a little slow, but the ai's are getting better and better, so it's really getting smooth and easy.
In general, Japanese is actually a very computer-friendly language. It's grammatically strict, making contextual inference fairly simple. It's non-tonal and non-inflexive, so voice recognition is surprisingly easy.
Now, Chinese is a whole different matter. It's the source of most internationalization angst for the pacific rim.
Personally, I want one of these (the top one =)): Fujitsu P-2000. The specs beat the Sony one hands down, it has a modular (!) cdrw/dvd bay that can be used for a second battery, built-in 100baseT/wavelan, faster Crusoe, all for an ultra-low $1800. The graphics adapter sucks, but I can live with that.
And it's 10.6"(w) x 7"(d) x 1.59"(h), which makes it only a tiny bit less portable than the Sony one. I admit the Sony can look more attractive, but you'll have to haul around an extra cd drive and pcmcia card for equivalent functionality.
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I took Japanese classes a few years ago. I tried looking at some web sites in Netscape 4.x on a Windows system. I even downloaded a few fonts to try to get it to work better. It never looked good.
Just now, using Galeon, I clicked on the link to the Japanese page, and oh my gosh wow! The whole thing looks like it should. Hiragana, katekana, kanji, English text, it's all there and it all looks like it should.
Kudos to the Mozilla and Galeon developers.
By the way, it still bemuses me how the Japanese like English words so much. They will use their Katekana phonetic alphabet and spell out English words by sound.
Their phonetic spellings look odd to English-speakers. In Japanese, the consonant sounds don't appear alone; you can never have just "k", it has to be "ka", "ki", "ku", "ke", or "ko". The sole exceptions are "m" and "n" (e.g. "Nisan" can end with just "n" instead of "nu"). There is no "l", so they use "r" for "l" when doing foreign words. They often swallow or drop the "u" sound, so a Japanese speaker pronouncing the word "mobairu" will say something like "mobile" (i.e. he will get it pretty much correct, even though the spelling looks odd to us).
Examples on that page: "katarogu PDF" is the link to the PDF Catalog; "rainuppu" is the link to the "lineup"; and the picture showing two hand thumb-typing says "mobairu gurippu sutairu" (mobile grip style).
Note that the name "Vaio" is very difficult for the Japanese to pronounce; the phonetic spelling is "Baio", much easier for them. Japanese doesn't have a "v" sound.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
How a 867mhz processor (NOW, not "soon"). How about a 1024x768 screen (can you say decent surfing, document editing, picture viewing). How about two USB ports and a firewire port (can you say "standard peripherals"). How about a 20GB HD. How about being able to run the SAME apps as your desktop.
;)
For me, Sony may have struck upon the near perfect form factor. PDA's are still toys (for me at least) and laptops (even subnotes) still too large to cart around day to day. It seems just about right. I can live with hunt and peck, heck, not much different than what I do with my keyboard now
Now I say make it sub 1 lb and integrate the wireless nic into the unit, and whammo, damn near perfect.
(paraphrased)
"We're sorry, but the fingers you are using to type are: TOO FAT. If you would like to aquire a special typing wand, please mash the keys: NOW"
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Completely agree. I have encountered the "sausage fingers" problem on a PCG-C1F since day 1 (C1F is the oldest pre-Crusoe Picturebook). This is almost twice smaller. It will be almost unuseable by anyone but 5 year old kids.
On this one I would need to hire a 5 year old kid and dictate to him and get sued for using child labour...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
It might be better if Sony's revenue stream dropped off entirely
Yes. I'm sure the tens of thousands of people whose livelihoods depend upon Sony would agree with you...
'Oooooh! They don't want us to openly thieve! They're so eeeevillll!!!'
Fuck's sake!
"Information wants to be paid"
It's nice twice as small- it's the same dimensions more or less except it's not as wide- i.e. the width of the keyboard is less. The screen is proper aspect ratio though, which the C1XX were not.
graspee
I have seen it for sale in shops in Tokyo- hope that answers your question.
graspee
try this link. It might just be a stylesheet issue.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I asked a Japanese co-worker why we don't have all the nifty technostuff Japan does. Interesting explaination:
In Japanese culture, women are not allowed to bring any money into a marriage. In centuries past, this made sense as they rarely had any money to bring. Today, Japanese women (like Americans) get married significantly older, and often have high-paying careers before getting hitched. Since they socially can't save that money for use in marriage, they have a relatively HUGE disposable income - coupled with miniscule apartments, no other big-ticket items (like house or car), and a fantastic telecom infrastructure (due to dense population) - they have the money & motivation to buy lots of really nifty communication-oriented (remember, these are women) gizmos.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
It's never made a diffrence that I've known, and I've been doing web stuff since '97
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.